Unexpected Jolts of Children’s Literature

It’s back!

So the way this works is simple: In my day job I purchase materials for adults for my library system. As a result, I see a lot of titles ostensibly for adults that have distinct ties to the world of children’s literature. I collect them over time and then, in a post like this one, present them to you, the readers.

Join me now as we explore a whole new plethora of Unexpected Jolts of Children’s Literature gracing our grown-ups’ shelves:

---

Vanishing Treasures: A Beastiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by Katherine Rundell

Last year Ms. Rundell was universally beloved. The bee’s knees. Thanks to the extraordinary success of her middle grade fantasy novel Impossible Creatures she was the veritable toast of the town. Yet there are layers to our Ms. Rundell. Apparently she has a penchant for writing adult nonfiction on the sly (did you know she wrote a biography of John Donne?!). In this book she uses literature, folklore, history, and science to write about twenty-two endangered species. A strong contender for the Alex Award, Kirkus said of this that, “Young and old will savor Rundell’s infectious enthusiasm for these remarkable and infinitely varied creatures.” I can personally attest to the popularity of this book in my library. I can’t keep this on the shelves! There are also illustrations in the book by artist Talya Baldwin.

---

One Week In January: New Paintings for an Old Diary by Carson Ellis

I’m not certain how I feel about reading book write-ups that call the year 2001 a “bygone era”. Here, you read the description of this book and you decide how it feels:

“In 2001, the young artist Carson Ellis moved into a warehouse in Portland, Oregon, with a group of fellow artists. For the first week she lived there, she kept a detailed diary full of dry observations, mordant wit, hijinks with friends and turn-of-the-millennium cultural touchstones. Now, Ellis has richly illustrated this two-decade-old journal in the signature style that has made her an award-winning picture book author today. This beautiful volume offers a snapshot of a bygone era; a meticulous re-creation of quotidian frustrations and small, meaningful moments; and a meditation on what it means both to start your journey as an artist and to look back at that beginning many years later.”

You see? I feel like I should be nice and dead before any of the eras I lived through as an adult get called “bygone”, but maybe that’s just me. In any case, it’s the rare Caldecott Honoree that can publish their own journal with new art, but Ellis (who created Du Iz Tak?) isn’t like other artists. PW loved this book too, saying that, “This snapshot of a struggling artist will captivate restless creatives of all stripes.”

---

The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar

This one was a bit of a shocker. The first two books I included in this post today are both nonfiction titles for adults, and that feels oddly natural in a way. But Louis Sachar is writing for adults now? The man behind Holes and Sideways Stories from Wayside School?!? I could hardly believe it myself, but it’s true. Still, even when he’s writing for adults, there’s something kid-centric in his plotting. Here’s the description:

Long ago and far away (and somewhere south of France) lies the kingdom of Esquaveta. There, Princess Tullia is in nearly as much peril as her struggling kingdom. Esquaveta desperately needs to forge an alliance, and to that end, Tullia’s father has arranged a marriage between her and an odious prince. However, one month before the “wedding of the century,” Tullia falls in love with a lowly apprentice scribe.

The king turns to Anatole, his much-maligned magician. Seventeen years earlier, when Anatole first came to the castle, he was regarded as something of a prodigy. But after a long series of failures—the latest being an attempt to transform sand into gold—he has become the object of contempt and ridicule. The only one who still believes in him is the princess.

When the king orders Anatole to brew a potion that will ensure Tullia agrees to the wedding, Anatole is faced with an impossible choice. With one chance to save the marriage, the kingdom, and, of most importance to him, his reputation, will he betray the princess—or risk ruin?

---

Fantasy by Bruno Munari

Bruno Munari! World famous everywhere but America! If ever you go to the Bologna Book Fair, Munari’s name is whispered there like a prayer. Though most of his biographies focus on his work in Futurism, Modernism, and various fields of the visual arts, his creative picture books are (to my mind) the real lure. Munari used textured, tactile surfaces, cut-outs, semi-see through papers, and all kinds of creative techniques. The Circus in the Mist is my own personal favorite.

Here is a description of this book. 50 points to it for the use of the word “microinterventions”:

Never before translated into English, Bruno Munari’s Fantasy, originally published in Italian in 1977, invites the reader to explore their own imagination, creativity and fantasy through a journey into Munari’s mind and work. His theory of creativity, developed in conversation with the Reggio Emilia Approach (a self-guided approach to education) and the work of Jean Piaget (a Swiss developmental psychologist who proffered a theory termed “genetic epistemology”) foregrounds the book’s journey through Munari’s design processes, both working for clients and teaching design principles to children. By turning both life and work into a classroom, Munari unlocks a path through imagination in order to access his, and in turn the reader’s, deepest sense of play.

The facsimile reprint is accompanied by new contextual annotations by Munari scholar and design historian Jeffrey Schnapp. These microinterventions highlight the innovations that make this work as relevant today as when originally published.

---

The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound: A Memoir by Raymond Antrobus

Last year the son of a friend of mine, a Kindergartner, was outfitted with hearing aids. She asked me for some picture book recommendations that might normalize the aids to the kid’s classmates. I obliged and then went on to turn the list into the post Book Recommendations: Reduced Hearing Picture Book Titles (Featuring Hearing Aids). Of course Raymond Antrobus was the author I thought of first when coming up with titles. Apart from Can Bears Ski? he wrote that incredible book last year Terrible Horses, which I loved so dearly.

Now Raymond has written is own memoir. This is the description:

Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at the age of six. He discovered he had missing sounds—bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn’t believe he was deaf at all.

The Quiet Ear tells the story of Antrobus’s upbringing at the intersection of race and disability. Growing up in East London to an English mother and Jamaican father, educated in both mainstream and deaf schooling systems, Antrobus explores the shame of miscommunication, the joy of finding community, and shines a light on deaf education.

Throughout, Antrobus sets his story alongside those of other D/deaf cultural figures—from painters to silent film stars, poets to performers—the inspiring models of D/deaf creativity he did not have growing up. A singular, remarkable work, The Quiet Ear is a much-needed examination of deafness in the world.

---

Yard Show by Janice N. Harrington

In the pantheon of my favorite picture books, one of the titles I think about again and again is The Chicken-Chasing Queen of Lamar County by Janice N. Harrington. I just loved that book. Back when I was a children’s librarian, when racist white patrons would tell me they wanted picture books that weren’t so “urban”, it was immediately the book I’d pull out and hand to them (can’t get much more “rural” than this!). I’d not tracked Harrington’s work in the poetry sphere, but clearly she’s been busy. In their starred review, PW described the book this way:

“The erudite latest from Harrington (Primitive) celebrates the yard show—a personalized, and personally significant, display of objects in one’s yard—as a microcosm for Black American expressions of place and belonging. Harrington’s poems draw on a variety of sources—from roadside signs to the words of Martin Luther King Jr.—to create a delightful poetic mélange that showcases the ingenuity of Black Americans making space for themselves.”

---

Making the Best of What’s Left: When We’re Too Old to Get the Chairs Reupholstered by Judith Viorst

This one’s less of a surprise. Viorst has probably been writing books for adults longer than most of us have been alive. The fact that she is still doing even today it is a testament to sheer will. You’ll know Viorst, of course, from books like Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day n’ such, but at 94 she’s been writing these kinds of adult books for decades upon decades. Here’s the plot description:

“In a career that has spanned more than fifty years, Judith Viorst has captivated readers with her bestselling children’s books and collections of poetry reflecting on each decade of life. Now in her nineties, Viorst writes about life’s “Final Fifth,” those who are eighty to one hundred years old. Her signature blend of humor and vulnerability infuses personal anecdotes and observations, drawing you into her world of memories and candid conversations.

She confesses, “I never ever send a text while driving, and not just because I don’t know how to text.” She discusses the afterlife (She doesn’t believe in it, but if it exists, she hopes her sister-in-law isn’t there). She complains to her dead husband (“I need you fixing our damn circuit breakers. I need you! Could you please stop being dead?”). And she explores the late-life meanings of wisdom and happiness and second chances and home.

With a wit that defies age, Viorst navigates the terrain of loss. It’s a poignant dance between grief and levity that will resonate with those in their Final Fifth as well as anyone who has parents, relatives, or friends in their eighties and beyond. This is Judith Viorst at her best.”

---

Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth): A Memoir by Markus Zusak

Yup. The author of The Book Thief wrote himself a memoir replete with dogs.

Normally my patrons aren’t all that keen on dog memoirs, but I’ve noticed that they’ve been picking up Zusak’s latest. This would be his first nonfiction title for adults, and it’s been getting stellar reviews. The plot description is:

“What happens when the Zusak family opens their home to three big, wild, street-hardened dogs—Reuben, more wolf than hound; Archer, blond, beautiful, destructive; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm?

The answer can only be chaos: There are street fights, park fights, public shamings, property damages, injuries, hospital visits, wellness checks, pure comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that must be read to be believed.”

---

The Story She Left Behind by Patti Callahan Henry

I’m ending with this one because it amuses me so much that a work of fiction can be about a fictional Caldecott Award winner. All the advertising says it’s based on “a true literary mystery”. If anyone wants to find me a copy of the book to tell me what that mystery is, I’d be grateful.

Here’s the plot:

“In 1927, eight-year-old Clara Harrington’s magical childhood shatters when her mother, renowned author, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, disappears off the coast of South Carolina. Bronwyn stunned the world with a book written in an invented language that became a national sensation when she was just twelve years old. Her departure leaves behind not only a devoted husband and heartbroken daughter, but also the hope of ever translating the sequel to her landmark work. As the headlines focus on the missing author, Clara yearns for something far deeper and more insatiable: her beautiful mother.

By 1952, Clara is an illustrator raising her own daughter, Wynnie. When a stranger named Charlie Jameson contacts her from London claiming to have discovered a handwritten dictionary of her mother’s lost language. Clara is skeptical. Compelled by the tragedy of her mother’s vanishing, she crosses the Atlantic with Wynnie only to arrive during one of London’s most deadly natural disasters—the Great Smog. With asthmatic Wynnie in peril, they escape the city with Charlie and find refuge in the Jameson’s family retreat nestled in the Lake District. It is there that Clara must find the courage to uncover the truth about her mother and the story she left behind.”

“

“

Filed under: Unexpected Jolts of Children's Literature